The Little Red Blog

Return of the Blinks

{As the probably non-existent God is my witness, I will get this blog up and running again...}

David Johnson, writing at Aeon, would like us all to stop sucking up to the rich, the powerful, and the inexplicably famous. In "Let Us Now Stop Praising Famous Men and Women," Johnson reminds us, in case we had forgotten, that "We live in an age of excessive praise for the wealthy and powerful." 

Do tell:

The upper echelons of society bathe in a sea of honours, awards and celebrity. We see it in the glossy magazines and at the so-called ideas festivals, where billionaires are fawned over for their bons mots. We applaud philanthropists for their largesse, even if their charity will do little ultimate good for society, and even if their conduct in acquiring their fortune was reprehensible. We commend them for dabbling in politics or pushing school reform, before we see any results, and even if we have reason to doubt the good that they will do.

Johnson dismisses the myth of meritocracy, as well as the "perverse incentives" he claims lead to "the smog of praise that permeates the upper echelons of society." In conclusion, he harrumphs:

If we want to foster a truly democratic society – a society in which we treat each other as equals – we must rein in such excessive praise and the perverse incentives that encourage it. We should aim for the opposite extreme, toward withholding praise and being more circumspect about the wealthy and powerful, to restore balance. As Justice Louis Brandeis, who witnessed our previous Gilded Age, might have said: ‘We may have democracy, or we may have praise showered on the heads of a few, but we can’t have both.’

As a society, we have opted for a fascination with, and a vicarious enjoyment of, "the lifestyles of the rich and famous," thereby rendering us increasing insensible to what Abraham Lincoln, in describing his early life, called "the short and simple annals of the poor". Every man-jack among us is a Jay Gatsby wannabe, hoping to hit the big time and praying no one finds out the truth about how we got there.

Scott Fitzgerald once sighed that the rich are different from the rest of us; yes, said Ernest Hemingway, they have more money. To that we can add: more fame, more respect, more admiration, and more skeletons in their closets. "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime," said Balzac; if we're going to pay attention to the rich and famous, let's do so not by fawning over them but by unmasking their pretensions and exposing their crimes. 

https://aeon.co/ideas/let-us-now-stop-praising-famous-men-and-women

Given that Bryan Caplan's THE CASE AGAINST EDUCATION came out over a year and a half ago, I'm not sure why Max Diamond, reviewing the book for Real Clear Books, calls it "new"; regardless, Diamond's interview with Caplan allows me to reiterate my own anti-education talking points while passing the blame for them to someone else.

Here's how Diamond opens his article:

In his controversial new book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, economist Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of American education is not to enhance students' actual skill but to signal and certify the qualities of a good, conformist employee. RealClearBooks recently interviewed Caplan about the rise of credentialism, useless degrees, and why we need to rethink our entire approach to education. 

Caplan's arguments should only be "controversial" to education professionals and to the minority of students (10% would be my guess) who take our current system seriously. Who else would argue when Caplan says:

People do learn some literacy and numeracy in school. But most of what you study in school predictably you’re not going to use after the final exam. You know that you’re not going to become a poet or a professional historian. And so, then there’s the puzzle about why exactly the study of irrelevant subjects would lead to a better career in fields where you don’t even use what you’re taught. And what I say is that most of this is what economists call “signaling.” You are jumping through hoops in order to impress employers. Even though it’s not directly relevant, still it’s a good way of convincing someone who might want to hire you that you’ve got the right stuff. The way I like to describe it is that to a large degree school isn’t really job training, instead it’s a passport to the real training which occurs on the job.

Those who argue that a traditional "liberal arts" education produces individuals who are culturally informed and who possess both depth and breadth in their approach to life certainly have a point--if only such an education were on offer for most students, and if only such individuals were valued in our society over against winners of the birth lottery and amoral sharpers (see above).  Still: are "better educated people" necessarily "better people"? There's not a scintilla of evidence for that. 

As Caplan explains, "credentialing" and "signaling" are the true functions of our current education system, along with keeping kids off the streets and (we hope) out of trouble. Our schools are notably deficient at what we might call "character formation," nor do they reward, as a rule, either the inquisitive mind or the non-conforming temperament; instead, they function primarily as youth detention centers and as ministries of social/cultural propaganda.

Part of the pleasure of reading Diamond's interview with Caplan is to witness the interviewer flailing, attempting to understand how the interviewee's thesis can possibly be correct. Imagine, if you will, the consequences of admitting our schools are mostly pointless.

Why do we persist in miseducating generation after generation of our youth? Caplan has an answer, or at least an informed surmise:

What I think is really going is what George Orwell called double-think. If you just talk to an individual about what they’ve seen I find that almost everyone agrees with me. But as soon as you switch gears to big social theory like what’s the best education system and what should our education policy be, this is where people forget everything they’ve seen with their own eyes and just start talking about how great education is, and how vital it is, and how incredibly useful it is and wonderful. And what I see as the problem is that politics just tends not to calm assessments of what you’ve really seen but to flowery ideas and feel good slogans and that kind of thing. One of my favorite things in all of psychology is what they all social desirability bias. That means that when the truth is ugly, people don’t want to believe it. They certainly don’t want to say it.

Yet truth, ugly as it may be, will set us free, or so it's been said. American schools under-perform not because we don't invest enough money in them and not because we don't have excellent and dedicated teachers; they do so because their mission, purpose, and methodologies are largely misguided. Young children and restless adolescents sitting indoors at desks for hours at a time, cut off from the outside world and from interaction with anyone but age-group peers and over-burdened teachers: there has to be a better way.

https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2019/09/09/the_case_against_education_18924.html

   

Dear Jerks: Please Learn Some Manners

It has come to this: The Baffler has published an essay about the importance of good manners, an essay in which the author cites, of all people and I kid you not, Gertrude Himmelfarb. 

Which is not to gainsay the value or the insights of Angela Nagle's "A Tragedy of Manners". Ms. Nagle acknowledges the irony of "manners" talk coming from the Left, just as she acknowledges that one of the more lasting consequences of the Sixties was the wholesale rejection of prudishness and middle-class propriety. It was that rejection which prompted Gertrude Himmelfarb's 1995 invocation of Victorian manners and morals, THE DEMORALIZATION OF SOCIETY.  As Angela Nagle notes: 

The neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb...drew upon her studies of Victorian England to contend that the post-sixties West would be unable to withstand the chaotic force of modernity without the strict set of manners and social rules that had governed public conduct until then. Western civilization, she argued, was on the brink of nothing less than total “demoralization.” Neocon polemicists—together with a few dour and cultured leftists like Lewis Lapham—also read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a sign of things to come.  

One could protest that the Boomers in the 1960s were not rejecting manners as such but their trivialization into formal systems of etiquette (Where the hell does the salad fork go? ) unrelated to the real purpose of manners: treating other people, especially people from different cultures and backgrounds (and even people with whom we disagree), with dignity and respect. We Boomers saw a society in which "Please" and "Thank you" were emphasized right alongside separate drinking fountains, separate swimming pools, and separte theater seating for whites and blacks: "Please remove yourself from that seat. Thank you for moving to the back of the bus." That sort of hypocrisy was what enraged us and engaged us; but it's undeniable that we may have thrown out the occasional well-mannered baby along with its tawdry bathwater. 

In any case, Angela Nagle makes a provocative case about the decline in American civility, best exemplified these days by the cult of Trump: 

Amid this ping-pong style search for the prime cause of Trump’s ascendancy, one factor continued to rank extremely high in the postmortem round of election polls: the appeal of Trump’s “tell it like it is” penchant for plain speaking and his corresponding rejection of our current definition of manners. Why would people regard candidate Trump’s comportment in the sphere of polite conduct, propriety, and etiquette—his style of speaking and self-presentation—as something just as important as the core economic elements of his platform? Again, our pundit-seers labored to read this finding as either coded racism or coded anti-elitism. But what if it really was just about manners? 

Comments on the bad manners of Donald Trump have come from a wide array of sources, all along the political spectrum. British Burkean conservative Peter Hitchens called him “an oaf and a yahoo who has gravely damaged the standards of public life.” The editors of National Review found themselves fielding the indefatigable rage of Trump’s online army when they contended, in high Buckleyite fashion, that Trump’s own trollish incivility was a first-order threat to the health of our civilization. Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek said of the new wave of Trumpian rightists that "They represent the decay of common morality and decency. And I use here the very precise term, Hegel calls it Sittlichkeit. It’s not simple morality, it’s a set of thick unwritten rules which makes our social life bearable. And, paradoxically, I think that progressives should become the voice of common decency, politeness, good manners, and so on." 

Ms. Nagle elaborates on the relevance of Zizek's "paradox": 

Žižek was, as is his wont, knowingly using language that would generally make leftists cringe. Beyond the playful counter-intuitive style of Žižek and the more conventional pleas for cultural decency from Hitchens and National Review, most would recoil from using the outmoded, prissy-sounding language of manners today. Such talk seems either hopelessly uptight or ridiculously trivial in a period of such grave political turmoil and upheaval. Yet the question of manners, if not the naming of it, actually claims unusual pride of place in American political and cultural debate—usually via the debased rhetoric plotting out the battle over “political correctness.”  

The same basic paradox assails all spheres of political and cultural confrontation in the Trump era: we instinctively abjure reckoning directly with the subject of manners—and yet it goes to the heart of everything that is happening. There’s a culture-wide unease with the discussion of manners—which in turn conceals a larger and far more momentous breakdown in a viable understanding of manners in today’s America...We’re now in the midst of an extremely fraught renegotiation of the values expressed in our system of manners. Formerly those values stemmed from an understanding on both sides that manners form the fabric of anything we might call society—and that they may prove far more powerful in deciding the fate of a nation, or even a civilization, than any given economic policy or trade deal. 

Ranging wide in the brief space of her essay, Nagle cites the work of sociologist Norbert Elias, of culture critic Robert Hughes, and of controversialist Camille Paglia. She also notes the political Right's fascination with the idea of civilizational decline and its corresponding dismissal of the very notion of Progress: 

Part and parcel of [the] declensionist revival on the right is a challenge to the idea of progress. The urgency of Trump’s appeal for the online right seems to stem from the mounting conviction that the West is rapidly degenerating, usually under the rubric of progress as administered and championed by cultural liberals. Around 2015, 4chan’s /pol/ board popularized a meme using the phrase “Come on it’s (the current year)” to mock naïve progressives like satirist John Oliver. The meme questioned the arbitrary insistence that moving forward in time must necessarily mean having superior values. More recently, a widely shared meme read something like, “1970: ‘I can’t wait for flying cars/space colonies/a cure for cancer’” followed by the year 2017 and some absurd visual representation of contemporary identity politics—like an image of a man who identifies as a dog or an adult baby. The political message is clear: either progress itself is a myth, or we have stopped progressing and started regressing as a civilization and are now intractably sinking into a decivilizing process. 

It is, as I say, a thought-provoking piece, and one which Ms. Nagle concludes in this way: 

The problem in our current, unacknowledged controversy over manners is that while both sides seem to implicitly accept [the importance of manners], they have directly opposing views of what our system of manners should be doing and what values it should be normalizing. As a result, a chaos reigns on all sides; constraints are eagerly thrown off in a gesture of liberation but then elsewhere more harshly enforced than ever. The incoherent tumult of the present moment’s culture wars masks what is, at bottom, a battle over what this shared system of manners will be. And if Trumpism has taught us nothing else, it should be this: the prim-sounding process by which our public manners are defined and negotiated may well be the key to everything else. 

I for one don't care if the table is set according to the Amy Vanderbilt rules or not, and I don't even care if you say "please" when you ask me to pass the gravy. But how about we agree that I'll stop referring to you as a "right-wing moron" if you'll stop calling me a "libtard," and I'll drop the "troglodyte" if you'll drop the "feminazi"? A little respect for each other: is that too much to ask? 

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-tragedy-of-manners-nagle  

The Masks of the Status Quo

Conservatives tend to be fond of the late Reinhold Niebuhr, in whose political realism they find a bracing antidote to liberal and progressive daydreams of Utopia.  But Niebuhr, skeptical and cautionary as he was about the limits of politics, also insisted on tearing away the masks of the social status quo, masks which conservatives would prefer stay in place:

“Even if,” Niebuhr wrote (in MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY), “it is granted that differentials in economic rewards are morally justified and socially useful, it is impossible to justify the degree of inequality which complex societies inevitably create…The literature of all ages is filled with rational and moral justifications of these inequalities, but most of them are specious.  If superior abilities and services to society deserve special rewards it may be regarded as axiomatic that the rewards are always higher than the services warrant.”

Noting that “No impartial society determines the rewards” and that “The men of power who control society grant these perquisites to themselves,” Niebuhr states bluntly that “Most rational and social justifications of unequal privilege are clearly afterthoughts…dictated by the desire of men of power to hide the nakedness of their greed, and by the inclination of society itself to veil the brutal facts of human life from itself.”

Niebuhr finds such chicanery “pathetic but understandable,” easily explained by one simple fact: “individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience.  They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those they commit”—anything, that is, other than accept the tragic truth that “the facts of man’s collective life easily rob the average individual of confidence in the human enterprise.”  

Bracing stuff indeed, but perhaps not in quite the way conservative admirers of Niebuhr usually intend: Niebuhr is saying that almost all social distinctions, rewards, and privileges are nothing but theft tacitly accepted as the cost of having a society in the first place.  A society that acknowledges that theft will have a hard time resisting calls for reform, redistribution, and even revolution, though Niebuhr would be the first to advise, wearily, that in the end none of that will make much difference: bottom rail might get on top for a while, and the direction of injustice might be temporarily reversed, but the essential unjust dynamic of human society wouldn’t change. Still, bottom rail might enjoy the view from the top for a while, and top rail might find itself suitably chastened by even a temporary demotion—or perhaps the demotion would just whet its appetite for restoration and vengeance.

MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY should be required reading for anyone interested in politics—which is to say, ideally, for all citizens. It’s also well worth re-reading from time to time, which is what I am presently doing.  In its pages a reader will find, albeit possibly to her dismay, an answer to Rodney King’s question/lament, “Can we all get along?”  The answer, sadly, is No, not really; and Reinhold Niebuhr did as much as anyone to explain why.

Against Contempt

At The American Conservative, Gracy Olmstead today writes about “The Problem of Contempt in Christianity”—but why confine “the problem of contempt” to Christians or to religion in general?   Contempt is the opposite of respect, and it is toxic to all human relationships and to all human societies.  So allow me to generalize and extrapolate from Ms. Olmstead’s remarks: if it’s true that “[People today] are fragmented, and often sneering, about their differences and preferences,” it’s also true that “This division and disdain builds resentment and anger...Rather than experiencing unity, they foster anger and derision.”

Might there be a better way?

“Instead of responding to…differences with contempt, what if we tried to assume the best of the other, looked for shared truths, united on core [values], and spoke with combined honesty and generosity about the things we see as misguided or wrong? What if we spent more time in shared service, “showing interest and support” for those actions we see as laudable and important, rather than merely looking for things to critique in the…“others” around us?”

Lest we feel ourselves morally and/or intellectually compromised by such an approach, Ms. Olmstead hastens to reassure us:

“Of course, this doesn’t mean neglecting the things we see wrong in our [world]. But we shouldn’t forget that [the world] is made up of weak, fallible, and limited human people.”

(Including, I would add, ourselves—weak, fallible, and limited as we are, we might even sometimes be wrong.)

“Our goal,” Gracy Olmstead rightly concludes, “today and for the rest of our lives, should be to build loving, lasting relationships with the people we will spend eternity with…”  And for those who don’t believe in eternity, it should be enough that such relationships will surely enhance and enrich our brief and difficult time upon this earth.

__________________________________________________

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-problem-of-contempt-in-christianity/

History's Winners?

Chuck Klosterman's I WEAR THE BLACK HAT isn't about politics (it's about villainy, which isn't all that far removed), but I was struck by this political observation, if only because it echoes something I wrote recently:

"Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives.  Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive).  It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually.  Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives.  Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age."

I'm not convinced by all of that; for instance, I think there are plenty of historians who consider themselves either conservative or (perhaps) ideologically neutral.  Equally, there are plenty of radical views--eugenics, for one, or "social Darwinism"--that don't seem to improve with age at all. Nevertheless, Klosterman's point is one that at least has to be confronted by conservatives: in a world that seems to be about change, how does one defend any given status quo, much less seek a restoration of what has been lost? 

The Young Adults Are Alright

Ross Douthat has read (sort of) a survey from the Pew Research Center, “Millennials in Adulthood,” and he has used his bully pulpit at the New York Times to sound the alarm about the findings:

“IN the future, it seems, there will be only one “ism” — Individualism — and its rule will never end. As for religion, it shall decline; as for marriage, it shall be postponed; as for ideologies, they shall be rejected; as for patriotism, it shall be abandoned; as for strangers, they shall be distrusted. Only pot, selfies and Facebook will abide — and the greatest of these will probably be Facebook.” ¹

That this is a tendentious caricature (at best) of the survey can be determined just from that last sentence—even Ross Douthat isn’t silly enough to belief that Millennials will spend their lives devoted to “pot, selfies, and Facebook”.  Regardless, Ross is serious about the survey’s dire implications for our social and political life:

“That’s the implication, at least, of what the polling industry keeps telling us about the rising American generation, the so-called millennials.  A new Pew survey, the latest dispatch from the land of young adulthood, describes a generation that’s socially liberal on issues like immigration and marijuana and same-sex marriage, proudly independent of either political party, less likely to be married and religious than earlier generations, less likely to identify as patriotic and less likely — by a striking margin — to say that one’s fellow human beings can be trusted.

“The common denominator is individualism, not left-wing politics: it explains both the personal optimism and the social mistrust, the passion about causes like gay marriage and the declining interest in collective-action crusades like environmentalism, even the fact that religious affiliation has declined but personal belief is still widespread.”

Douthat goes on to invoke Robert Nisbet’s 1953 classic QUEST FOR COMMUNITY; he does so apparently without realizing that his worries about “individualism” are thus revealed to be absolutely nothing new.²  In fact, they’re something of a chestnut; American conservatives (and some on the Left) have been lamenting the loss of community and of “mediating institutions” for decades now.  Conservatives, however, have also simultaneously been cheerleaders both for capitalism (the very system that has tended to undermine community in the first place³) and for Randian individualism (in fairness to Douthat, he has not been guilty of that, at least).

More importantly, Mr. Douthat has both cherry-picked the Pew survey (it’s available online⁴, should you care to cherry-pick it for yourself) and completely ignored at least one important factor in the results—economic uncertainty/insecurity.  Nowhere does Douthat suggest that social views might be influenced by economic realities; he’s too busy going on about Big Ideas to bother looking at silly things like stagnant wages, outsourced jobs, a near-collapse of the financial system, burdensome personal debt, and lingering levels of high unemployment (and underemployment).

The folks at Pew know better, fortunately.  Read through their report and you’ll see they point out (for example) that, although Millennials have been putting off marriage,  “Most unmarried Millennials (69%) say they would like to marry, but many, especially those with lower levels of income and education, lack what they deem to be a necessary prerequisite—a solid economic foundation.”  Given that “Millennials are also the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations (Gen Xers and Boomers) had at the same stage of their life cycles,” one can understand a certain hesitation on their part to start up families.

Similarly, when it comes to “social distrust,” the Pew authors point out that “sociologists have theorized that people who feel vulnerable or disadvantaged for whatever reason find it riskier to trust because they’re less well-fortified to deal with the consequences of misplaced trust”; in other words, the level of social trust drops in hard times, as other citizens become competitors for scarce resources (jobs) rather than sharers in prosperity.⁵ 

Economics are only one factor, of course; technology is another.  Millennials might seem to be indifferent individualists to Douthat, but in reality “They have also taken the lead in seizing on the new platforms of the digital era—the internet, mobile technology, social media—to construct personalized networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups.” It’s reasonable to speculate as to whether these networks and affinity groups will prove as sturdy and as socially useful as more old-fashioned institutions (the Elks Lodge, the Knights of Columbus, the Ku Klux Klan Chamber of Commerce, etc.), but it’s also reasonable to point out that previous generations didn’t have the option of personalized digital networks, and to suggest that they probably would have seized it if it had been available. It’s less ideology than it is opportunity that prompts Millennials to go online.⁶ 

As for patriotism, the Pew survey doesn’t say it’s being abandoned; in fact, it says that 49% of Millennials agree that the phrase “a patriotic person” describes them well (35% say the phrase is a “perfect” description).  True, that’s a lower percentage than registered by previous generations; on the other hand, Millennials “are also somewhat more upbeat than older adults about America’s future, with 49% of [them] saying the country’s best years are ahead…” I’ll take upbeat optimism over self-ascribed “patriotism” any time.

Religion?  Douthat is correct that both religious belief and religious affiliation are on the decline: “[Millennials are] less likely to say they believe in God. A solid majority still do—86%—but only 58% say they are “absolutely certain” that God exists, a lower share than among older adults, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project.” Perhaps these numbers reflect the fact “that fully a third of older Millennials (ages 26 to 33) have a four-year college degree or more—making them the best-educated cohort of young adults in American history.”  Still, 86% believing in God doesn’t sound like a major decline in belief to me—maybe Douthat, good Catholic that he is, is disturbed by the lack of “absolute certainty”?  Even so, he ought not ignore what the report’s authors mention: “But if past is prologue, these young adults may develop a stronger belief in God over the course of their lives, just as previous generations have.” 

That last observation can be extended beyond religion: “The attitudes formed in early adulthood don’t always stay fixed. In the latest Pew Research survey, about half of all Boomers (53%) say their political views have grown more conservative as they have aged, while just 35% say they have grown more liberal.” Ross Douthat ignores that, since it’s inconvenient for his thesis; he’d rather just extrapolate from current attitudes, assuming them to be etched in stone and assuming that Millennialls will still be all about pot, selfies, and Facebook even when they enter the retirement home (set up for Wi-Fi, no doubt).

If Mr. Douthat is worried about increased individualism and the loss of community, he should by all means write about it; but he ought not to distort the findings of one particular survey, nor offer that survey as normative, to make his case.  His central concern is that human beings deprived of true community may be duped into joining ersatz substitutes (cults, sects, the Republican Party, etc.) and can be easy prey for charismatic figures (Ayn Rand, Jim Jones, Glenn Beck,  etc.).  That’s always a possibility and always a danger, but there’s nothing in the Millennial mindset, at least so far as this Pew survey indicates, to suggest that Millennials—well-educated, wary, and skeptical as they are—can get played for suckers any more easily than their parents or grandparents (some of whom probably voted for Huey Long, George Wallace, and/or Pat Buchanan).

To quote the noted sociologist Mr. Pete Townshend: I’m pretty sure the kids—the young adults, really, in this case— are alright.

________________________________________________________________

 ¹ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-age-of-individualism.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

² A new edition of Nisbet’s “magnum opus” was released in 2010 by SI Books; quite by coincidence, it featured “a brilliant introduction by NewYork Times columnist Ross Douthat”.

³ Along with the automobile, which undermined communities both by providing individuals with greater geographical mobility and by changing the landscape and design of the communities themselves: see any number of books on the subject, but particularly THE GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE (James Howard Kunstler) and ASPHALT NATION (Jane Holtz Kay).  While Douthat sees the internet and Facebook as threats to community (and he’s not alone in that), some see them as much needed alternatives to what we had already lost.

⁴ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2014/03/2014-03-07_generations-report-version-for-web.pdf

⁵ People who lived through the Great Depression will tell you otherwise; they’ll insist that everyone came together back then in neighborly fashion and shared what they had.  Don’t believe those people; they’re old and cranky and their memories are unreliable.

⁶ Bill O’Reilly, of course, insists that Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have used Facebook; but what did I just tell you about cranky old people?

ADDENDUM: It’s bad enough that Rod Dreher (The American Conservative) thinks that Ross Douthat nailed it perfectly with his Millenials column (did Rod bother to read the Pew survey on which it was based?); worse, he drags T.S.Eliot into the conversation.  Here is Dreher's quote (citation unspecified) from the late Mr. Eliot:

“So long…as we consider finance, industry, trade, agriculture merely as competing interests to be reconciled from time to time as best they may, so long as we consider “education” as a good in itself of which everyone has a right to the utmost, without any ideal of the good life for society or for the individual, we shall move from one uneasy compromise to another. To the quick and simple organization of society for ends which, being only material and worldly, must be as ephemeral as worldly success, there is only one alternative. As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term “democracy,” as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike––it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/gotta-serve-somebody-millennials-douthat-nisbet-eliot/  

Give me, as they say, a freaking break.  Numerous commenters on Mr. Dreher's blog have properly labeled this nonsense for what it is, so I won’t bother.  I’ll just say this: Eliot wrote those words seventy or so years ago; has his dictum come true—has the increasingly secular West turned totalitarian?  Which advanced democracy has instituted concentration camps or established a gulag?  Theists do themselves and their cause no favor by telling the rest of us that unless we serve their God we’re doomed to serve tyrants and monsters instead.

Heroics, Earthly And Otherwise

 I've been enjoying Richard Beck's Experimental Theology website as much for his choice of subject matters as for his approach to said matters.  Mr. Beck has blogged about Powers and Principalities, about the theology of William Stringfellow, and about the music of Johnny Cash.  He has directed readers to the writings of Sara Miles and to the work of Terror Management Theory; as regards that latter, he has provided helpful insight into the theories of the late Ernest Becker, whose book DENIAL OF DEATH is yet one more classic I've always intended to read but which I have found too daunting actually to do so. So I was grateful to find, at www.experimentaltheology.com, this excerpt from Becker:

"[T]his is what a society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system . . . But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism . . . It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count."

The excerpt confirms what I always understood (without having read DENIAL OF DEATH) to be the primary point of Becker's work: that much of human energy, drive, and accomplishment ("earthly heroics") is fueled by our (mostly subconscious) desire to thwart and to outlast death.  O death, where is thy victory?  Oh death, where is thy sting?  It has always seemed evident to me that Christianity flourished as it did in the ancient world in large part because it had answers (or claimed to have them) to those questions.  Not every person can bestride the world like a colossus, or can have a pyramid constructed for himself, or can have her name on the side of a skyscraper; not everyone is capable of or even given the opportunity for earthly heroism.  But Christianity said that anyone and everyone--even, and perhaps especially, the least among us--could be immortal; it said that heroism and immortality consisted in kindness and compassion, in charity and in mercy.  And how do you like them apples, Mr. Death?

As for Richard Beck's take on this (as opposed to mine), he writes the following:

"Specifically, the sin in cultural heroics is the elevation of the self over others in a delusional attempt to outlast death. And we often attempt this self-glorification by climbing over the heads and backs of others, often violently so.

"The sin of cultural heroics is the way in which we try to evade death through the glorification of the self and how that self-glorification breaks communion with others."

If Christianity calls people into communion--and it does--it thereby offers a way to break Death's grip without falling prey to the temptation to "cultural heroics" and to the glorification of the self; it offers hope in solidarity, rather than in competition, with others. Of course Christians, no more than any other faith community, cannot remove themselves entirely from the larger culture--thus William Stringfellow's AN ETHIC FOR CHRISTIANS AND OTHER ALIENS.  Even if they could do so, they would be not avoiding culture but simply creating a new culture of their own; they could not be avoiding culture, because culture is inescapable: it is the very air we breathe.  And so temptation remains, because what would earthly life be without temptation?  Earthly heroics may be replaced by spiritual heroics, and earthly ambitions may be replaced by spiritual ambitions: but the self will still seek reassurance that it matters, in heaven as it does on earth. 

On The Road And In Decline

I'm spending a few days in Billings, Montana--the Magic City of the Treasure State, and (this winter) the fifth-snowiest city in America.  Occupied as I am being a proper guest while here, I probably won't do much blogging...

which is a shame, because the annual CPAC gathering is going on right now--the Conservative Political Action Conference--and I'm sure it's producing lots of juicy soundbites.  I'll get to them next week, I'm sure.

For now, I'd like to note that Bill O'Reilly has confirmed my statements about Fox News being given to constant alarms about American decline: Papa Bear Bill did a "Talking Points Memo" just last night on that very subject, a memo titled, yes, "America in Decline".¹  "The stark truth is, America is getting weaker on almost every front," alarmed O'Reilly, who enumerated our economic and military woes and then went on to say "On the social front, we are heading for disaster": out-of-wedlock babies, teachers' unions, legalized marijuana, whites dancing with blacks cats sleeping with dogs and people demanding government entitlements.  "I could give you scores of other examples," O'Reilly said, "to back up the steep decline in the economy, civility, and education."  But you know what's the worst thing about it?  "And you will not, you will not see those examples defined," Mr. O sputtered, "by a corrupt national media which refuses to honestly cover the news."  Followed by a reference to Lois Lerner of the corrupt thugocracy that is the IRS--with Bill O'Reilly yet again failing to mention that Ms. Lerner was appointed to her post by George W. Bush.

Anyway, Bill O'Reilly says we're in decline (a claim most easily proven by the ratings of Fox News), just as we've been for at least fifty years; see, for instance, John T. Flynn's THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, which was published in 1955, when America was under the thumb and in the grip of the Dwight Eisenhower regime, a regime which barely hinted at the horrors that were to follow.  Or check out any of the works of the esteemed culture warrior Patrick J. Buchanan, the titles of whose books alone tell the grim tale: DEATH OF THE WEST, for instance, or STATE OF EMERGENCY,or SUICIDE OF A SUPERPOWER.  Mr. Buchanan followed in the footsteps, ideological and literary, of James Burnham, one of the leading lights of the original National Review, who wrote SUICIDE OF THE WEST in 1964.

In other words: ho-hum, Mr. O'Reilly.  Chicken Littles on the Right have been clucking the same tired old alarm for decades.  I assume there's money in it, else why would O'Reilly (or anyone) embarrass himself with such stale and easily refuted hysterics?

When I read the "Talking Points" transcript, at first I thought my favorite part was this: "Children at risk are beset with corruptive influences as the cynical entertainment industry peddles garbage to young people with little opposition from an apathetic media which tilts secular left."  But I continued reading and, sure enough, Mr. O'Reilly topped himself (so to speak):

"Crude behavior at sports arenas is tolerated as is lying under oath in the nation's courtrooms which are under siege by nuisance lawsuits designed by legal shakedown artists who have absolutely nothing to lose in a system which refuses to hold them accountable." 

That is some fancy wordsmithing, Mr. Talking Points, a veritable word-cloud of epic proportions--if only (and I say this more in sadness than in anger) it meant anything at all.  If you want real evidence of decline in this country, I suggest you compare the bloviations of O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh with the prose of their predecessors on the Right: e.g. Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., James Burnham, Richard Weaver, Whittaker Chambers etc.  Not that those latter were correct on the substance, necessarily, but at least they knew how to compose and deploy actual rhetoric.  

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¹ "Talking Points Memo" is the part of his show in which O'Reilly gets to express his opinions in the third-person (as in "Talking Points believes...").

Two Links To Linker

Before Bubble Boy takes over this blog and Fox News takes over my life for the month of February, I’d like to recommend the work of Damon Linker, whom I do believe I’ve mentioned before.  Mr. Linker writes for This Week (among other places) about politics, culture, and religion—really, about whatever interests him.  He has previously been editor of First Things, has written speeches for Rudy Giuliani (nobody’s perfect), and is a proud (I assume) graduate of Ithaca College.

In two recent articles, Linker has discussed, respectively, income inequality and America’s apparently endless “culture wars”.  He is not particularly sanguine about our prospects of resolving either of those issues any time soon, but he has some things to say that are worth considering.  Here is (part of) his take on our new plutocracy:

In theory, capitalism provides equal opportunities to every individual, allowing him or her to use innate talent and ambition, combined with more than a dash of luck, to achieve economic success. Also in theory, economic failure is supposed to be justly earned, a product of a deficiency of talent, ambition, and luck.

The reality, of course, is very different — and becoming more so with every passing year. We start out our lives profoundly unequal. Some Americans grow up impoverished, attending chaotic, academically worthless schools, and exposed to an enormous range of social and cultural obstacles to achievement both at home and in the local environment. Others, by contrast, receive a world-class education at school, continual emotional and scholastic support at home, access to tutors, test-prep, and even pharmaceuticals to compensate for a range of cognitive and behavioral deficits.

That’s nothing compared with what we see at the very top of the income hierarchy. The upper middle class might enjoy all kinds of advantages over the poor and lower middle class in getting their children into elite colleges. But the superrich play by different rules. An upper middle class mom might be able to use a network of well-connected friends and colleagues to get her son an interview at a top firm shortly after graduation. But Henrique De Castro’s boss gets herself invited to the White House for some face time with the president of the United States.

America is well on the road to producing a class of self-perpetuating, self-insulating, self-aggrandizing oligarchs who enjoy luxury, power, and access many orders of magnitude greater than anyone else in the nation.

Savor, and take seriously, that last sentence; then read the whole thing here: http://theweek.com/article/index/255626/the-shameful-self-dealing-of-americas-super-rich  

After that, you should go on to read Damon Linker’s piece about what he calls “the cultural fracturing of the United States”:

The old talk of a red state/blue state divide got at part of what's going on culturally, but only a small and misleading part. Even the bluest state has red communities within it, and the same holds for blue areas in red states. Looked at through different lenses, our divisions can be described as regional (North vs. South; coasts vs. heartland), geographical (urban vs. rural), intrareligious (traditionalist believers vs. liberal believers), interreligious (observant vs. secular), and technological (like-minded people coming together online and forming ideologically and morally homogenous communities without regard for real-world distances).

Here in “red state” Montana, ensconced as some of us are in the true-blue community of Missoula, an hour’s drive from Tea Party factions to our south and white supremacist militias to our north, we are well aware that the picture gets pretty complicated and that cultural common ground can be hard to find (though all of us, out here, love Montana).  In theory, says Linker, the ties that bind us should hold—but in reality, will they?

The liberal political theory that influenced and inspired America's founders tells us that these disagreements shouldn't be a problem. First devised in response to the bloody clashes of Europe's religious civil wars, classical liberalism proposes that a modern, liberal nation can cohere around devotion to the ideals and institutions that make it possible for its citizens to live together freely and in peace, despite their differences about the highest human goods.

But is that really enough when the differences go so far beyond early modern Christian factionalism, to include disagreements about fundamental questions of life, love, sex, pleasure, family, and even the very nature of reality and meaning of existence? Is there any upward limit on how much cultural difference is compatible with national cohesion? How long are Americans stationed on different sides of our numerous cultural fissures likely to feel bound together with strangers who view the world so very differently — especially when each side increasingly treats the others with open contempt?

Can a nation of more than 310 million people bind itself together with little more than an attachment to the very institutions that permit and foster its cultural disunity?

Take some time to ponder that disturbing but very real question and (again) then read the article for yourself: http://theweek.com/article/index/255660/what-if-the-culture-war-never-ends

I don’t know where Damon Linker falls (or where he thinks he falls) on the ideological spectrum or which side he takes on partisan issues.  I do know that his writing is thoughtful, intelligent, and refreshingly lacking in invective.  Sadly, Bubble Boy will have to give Mr. Linker a pass for the next month, but you shouldn’t.

The Virtue Of Stigma?

As Marco Rubio and David Brooks have lately reminded us, one approach to the problem of poverty is to blame it on the shoddy values and deplorable choices of the poor; in which case, the solution is to simultaneously encourage and (gently) shame the poor into adapting the superior values of their moral betters.

This approach has long been advocated by, among others, Gertrude Himmelfarb.* The following is from an interview Ms. Himmelfarb did (with the Acton Institute) some twenty years ago about her book THE DEMORALIZATION OF SOCIETY.  Asked whether the Victorian practice of stigmatizing the poor did not in practice amount to “dehumanizing” them, Ms. Himmelfarb answered:

“Its purpose was precisely the opposite – to make the poor better human beings by encouraging the able-bodied pauper to seek work and discouraging the laborer from lapsing into pauperism. The evil of excessive or “indiscriminate” relief, as the Victorians put it, was that it tended to pauperize, demoralize, and thus dehumanize the poor. Stigmatization is the other side of the coin of virtue. You can’t have a set of virtues, a system of values, without having a corresponding system of stigmas. The interesting thing about the workhouse was that conditions there were not always worse than the conditions of the poorest independent laborer; some contemporaries claimed that in terms of food and living conditions, they were sometimes better. What the Victorians understood, however, was that the workhouse was socially and morally demeaning. This was its great deterrent.” ¹

Note that when Ms. Himmelfarb was asked about the effect of stigmatizing the poor, she responded by citing its purpose—a neat evasion of the question. Did the poor feel dehumanized?  Did being stigmatized actually make them “better human beings”? Ms. Himmelfarb didn’t say, quite likely didn’t know, and possibly didn’t care.  It would, no doubt, be just like the poor to contrarily take the stigma sincerely offered for their own good and wear it instead as a badge of victimization about which to whine and behind which to hide.   

What’s of more interest, though, is Ms. Himmelfarb’s claim that “Stigmatization is the other side of the coin of virtue.” Some might have thought that “vice” was the flip side of that coin, but apparently it’s an entirely different coin, perhaps even from an entirely different mint. “You can’t have a set of virtues…without having a corresponding system of stigmas.” Virtue, it seems, can’t simply be taught, nurtured, inculcated, encouraged, modeled, or (as we say) incentivized; for it to prevail, virtue must have an enforcer, a bad cop to its good cop. Not only is virtue not its own reward (in Ms. Himmelfarb’s scheme, prosperity and social respectability are virtue's rewards), but it apparently can’t even exist without its evil twin, stigma. I don’t know how Ms. Himmelfarb ascertained this necessity, since she presented it as a self-evident (if regrettable) truth: No Virtue without Stigma.  David Brooks, for one, would surely nod his assent—we might wish, he would write, there were some other way, but alas, we must stigmatize if only to be kind.    

I can’t speak for virtuous people, not considering myself sufficiently qualified on that score, but I wonder how many of them would say that their road to virtue was paved with stigma, or that they found it helpful to be humiliated in various ways for their moral lapses (assuming they ever had any)?  If so, would they then recommend the revival of “scarlet letters” for adulterers and for unwed mothers?  How about a scarlet “B” for “bastard” and a scarlet “P” for “pauper”?  Perhaps recipients of government benefits (for the poor, of course, not for the middle-class or the rich) should be prominently listed in the local newspaper?  Should users of SNAP benefit cards be herded into a designated line at the supermarket?  Should they have to provide photo ID when using the card?  Should their names be recited over the store’s PA system?  Should they be required to beg, Please, sir or madam, I want some…food?

Others can debate—and are debating—the Brooks/Rubio assertion that marriage is the cure for poverty; I’ll stick with pointing out that the virtues of being stigmatized are mostly touted by people who rarely, if ever, have suffered it. 

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*I have grown weary of defending myself against accusations that "Gertrude Himmelfarb" is a fiction of my own devise. Google the woman yourself and get over it.

¹http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-5-number-4/learning-victorian-virtues